Why a Business Solutions Provider Chose Leah Platform for Contract Intelligence at Enterprise Scale

A business solutions provider, a large enterprise with global supply chain operations, managed all legal work internally without relying on outside counsel. This meant every efficiency gain directly impacted the legal team's capacity to serve the business. With a dispersed contracts team handling thousands of agreements across multiple locations, the organization faced mounting pressure from manual contract processes that consumed weeks of valuable legal resources.

The pain points were quantifiable and recurring. When the team needed to conduct change of control analysis across their vendor portfolio, the manual review process was estimated to take three weeks of internal effort plus outside counsel assistance. Meanwhile, they had learned that competitors using AI-powered tools were completing similar analyses in a matter of days. The gap was stark and costly.

Beyond these major compliance projects, the legal team experienced what the industry calls "corporate thrash" - a constant stream of interruptions for contract data extraction. Business partners would request specific information: pull payment terms across the entire portfolio, identify all contracts mentioning a particular customer, extract jurisdiction data, analyze specific clause types. Each request required manual review of thousands of contracts, turning what should be quick queries into weeks-long projects.

The team had tried to address these challenges through their contract intake process, but the solution created its own problem. Their intake forms had ballooned to approximately five pages, requiring manual input of jurisdictions, entity numbers, and extensive metadata for every contract. This defeated the purpose of automation - the forms were so complex they created adoption friction and slowed contract processing rather than accelerating it.

The consequences extended beyond time consumption. Recent change of control governance issues had exposed gaps in contract visibility and proactive risk management. The organization's existing SharePoint-based repository made finding specific contract information time-intensive, forcing legal team involvement in queries that should have been self-service. The team had developed useful playbooks and clause libraries, but these resources sat inaccessible, leading to repeated requests for the same information.

A business solutions provider was already mid-implementation of Leah core CLM platform, working toward their June milestone. The initial purchase decision focused on centralizing contracts and streamlining basic workflows - moving beyond SharePoint to a proper contract lifecycle management system.

During the implementation process, conversations with their account team touched on AI capabilities that were "coming" or "going to be there." The team understood that artificial intelligence would play a role in the platform's evolution, but the specifics remained unclear. There was some confusion about which AI features were included in the base purchase versus available as add-ons, and what timeline these capabilities would follow.

What the legal team needed went beyond basic repository management. They required three distinct capabilities to transform their operations:

First, they needed automated metadata extraction that could handle third-party paper at scale. Their existing approach could extract perhaps 15-20 fields from contracts, but comprehensive analysis required capturing 100+ data points. Manual intake was unsustainable, yet the metadata was essential for contract intelligence.

Second, they needed to accelerate internal review processes. Contract review cycles were explicitly described as "laborious" and "time-consuming," bottlenecking both legal operations and business velocity. The team couldn't scale to meet demand through manual approaches, and expanding headcount wasn't the answer.

Third, and perhaps most critically, they needed rapid discovery capabilities for their contract repository. Business partners needed answers to specific questions without always involving the legal team. Self-service contract intelligence would eliminate corporate thrash while empowering stakeholders across the organization.

The ideal solution would integrate seamlessly with their CLM implementation already in progress, leverage the configuration work they were doing on intake forms and field mapping, and provide enterprise-grade AI capabilities across extraction, analysis, and discovery. It needed to be intuitive enough for business partner self-service while maintaining appropriate legal oversight and governance.

The team also valued vendor partnership quality. They were working collaboratively with their implementation manager and wanted a vendor who could guide them through both base CLM deployment and AI capability expansion with strategic thinking about sequencing and adoption.